Start writing with Gistlog

We all know the routine, we have an idea and decide that it would make a great blog post. But… and there is always a caveat. You need a blog, you need a design, you need a redesign, you need… It’s inevitable! Of course, you could use a free app such as Medium or possibly Facebook, but you are just throwing your content into a walled garden.

Adam Wathan and Matt Stauffer decided to do something about those problems and came up a new Laravel application named Gistlog. Just as the name implies Gistlog utilizes GitHub’s Gists as the storage system so you can fully control your data and have revision control.

The way the app works is you create a new public Gist and write your blog post in Markdown. Next take the public URL and paste into the Gistlog home page. Like magic, your new post is live, wrapped in a clean design and branded with your avatar.

Example GistLog Post

The app is built on Laravel and everything is open source. Matt also created an almost two-hour video showing you how the project went from idea to prototype.

The only downside I see is uploading images is difficult. You can work around this by pointing to a public URL, but the Gist system currently doesn’t support dragging and dropping. However, this is typically a non-issue for developers as they rarely use images when explaining code and theory.

With that said it is perfect for writing. It has nice typography, clean code blocks, and beautifully simple.